Albanian-Speaking Blind User Interfacing Model

Abstract

The full or satisfactory perception of the environmental context is probably the most significant factor in describing "quality of life", among other health and social related issues. For people with impaired sense(s), especially those with unrecoverable loss of sight, being able to somehow compensate for sight dependable activities becomes the very meaning of life. Fortunately, contemporary technologies advancement allows for R&D efforts that result in more or less feasible solutions to most of those challenges. With the Internet being accessible to everybody, news and information is available beyond limits. One of the main focuses of the modern science is providing applications and the Web to blind and visually impaired. It is now possible more than ever by the advancements in User-Interfaces (UIs) and assistive technologies. There are already stand-alone text-to-speech screen reader applications that provide application-specific speech output. All these screen readers usually cover widely speaking languages. Understandable, it is also needed for all other languages. This paper depicts an UI model for Albanian speaking blind and visually impaired based on extensive research embracing screen readers analysis, text-to-speech technologies analysis, specially developed text-to-speech generator from Albanian texts, the analysis done on general Albanian texts as well as the basic principles of lexicons creations.  Index Terms-screen readers, speech synthesis, Albanianspeaking blind user interface, interfacing model